


Speech

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:28:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five languages she learned to speak, and one she already knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speech

_making scents_

The people of Sigma Eridani VI were friendly, in that they didn't shoot at anyone, relayed the initial survey team; they were also warp-capable, as they travelled between two worlds in neighbouring systems. It could be worth delaying first contact, the report continued, until any Federation linguist could understand a single word they said. Nyota had rolled her eyes a lot at the mission briefing.

"Hello," she said, tentatively, on the crisp, icy surface of the new world. Visibility was so low that she couldn't see her feet; although the sensors in her tricorder told her there was open water to her back and living beings in front, she couldn't see a thing. "I know… we know that you're there. We want you to know we're explorers, we haven't come to harm you in any way. Uh."

Another step forwards. "I understand others among our people have tried to communicate with you, and not had success. I'm here to try again, if that's all right."

 _When in doubt, just keep talking._ "I'm going to take another step forwards now." Her tricorder was beeping, telling her that she was about to breach the personal space of the nearest of them. "Uh, if you don't want me to, I hope you can indicate it in some way."

Abruptly, she sneezed, and cursed herself inwardly for it – and then became aware of a distinct smell of lemons. Thinking quickly, she stepped backwards – and suddenly there was rotting meat in her nostrils, all the harsh immediacy of carrion.

Thinking, she sat down on the ground, cross-legged, and the mist curled around her and smelled somewhere between porridge and azalea flowers.

"Aha," she said, entirely to herself.

Much much later, long after the Eridani petition to join the Federation had been received and granted, Nyota could still read the Federation Charter in scratch 'n' sniff lavender, pepper, citrus and soap.

*

 _compiling_

"And then," Nyota said, "my guide took me to visit his home, and he'd said it was his father's house. I asked if I could meet his father, and he said, my father walks with the spirits now. Okay, I thought, that's a euphemism for death, you hear it or something like it any number of cultures, there's a lot of precedent for that. And then he took me to the local school, and I met lots of Zenasti children, and they'd all been waiting for my visit, they were so excited. I asked one of them what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, in the future I see myself as a pilot so I can go out into the stars. And I wished him luck with it, and took a couple of notes and I still didn't get it, because clearly I must be stupid or something."

"That is exceedingly unlikely," Spock said, and leaned back a little in his chair. The room was quiet except for her voice and his breathing; he had taken to calling her on the comm system as his final act before retiring for the night.

"Thanks." Nyota smiled at the screen. On the surface of the moon, it was mid-morning; the pinkish light from the system's sun gleamed on her hair. "But I might not believe you. I had to have conversations with at least a dozen other people before I realised."

"Realised what?" Spock asked.

Nyota smiled again. "The language has no tenses. No, that's not right – it has present and subjunctive tenses, and some complicated ways to express things that definitely didn't happen, and things the speaker has only heard about. But it doesn't have what we would call past and future tenses; everything is somehow linguistically connected to an eternal present." She laughed. "It's very relaxing, actually."

Spock nodded. "That is not unknown, but it is nevertheless remarkable."

"And the Zenasti aren't the only sentient species on the planet, of course. The Kin live underground and even then, mostly on the other continent, so there's been very little linguistic mixing – only in the last generation or so. I took a shuttle over to visit them, and I suppose if your body is made of rock and the sounds you can make are kind of limited to rumblings and grindings, it would make sense for all your utterances to be quite concise."

Spock raised his eyebrows.

"I just can't hear the difference between the two-second rumble that means 'it is a pleasure to meet your acquaintance', and the one that means 'I disagree vehemently, you twice-damned offspring of a syphilitic whore', and how a species that doesn't have sexual reproduction has a word for 'whore', I don't even know."

"Perhaps the translator is becoming excessively idiomatic," Spock said, and couldn't prevent the corners of his mouth twitching upwards.

"Perhaps. And the third species, whose name goes, in Standard, tongue-click, sneeze, glottal stop, hi! Well, we don't even know if they have a language, or whether they actually communicate by direct mind-to-mind transfer, and whether their minds will even interface with mine. I've been advised to take the shuttle five hundred metres up, open the cargo doors and wait for them to appear. I'm told they look like small, starfish-shaped clouds. That's tomorrow's plan, so I'd better get some sleep." A pause. "Actually, I can't remember the last time I slept."

"I am sorry your work is so fatiguing," Spock said, carefully. "It is logical to wish for rest."

"Are you kidding?" Nyota grinned at him. "I want to retire here. Goodnight!"

The screen went blank. Spock stood up and walked towards his bed; not for the first time, he was finding himself filled with joy for no logical reason at all.

 

*

 _memory_

The people of the Light worked with their hands. Their world was made of chromium and glass, wood and stone, smoothed with saltwater, and time. Nyota had told Spock about their intricate art, their solidity of tradition, and the elegiac sparseness of their poetry. She had talked with her hands over breakfast, about cultural continuity and fluidity, and how a world never recorded was never objective, described and experienced in flux.

She hadn't been afraid until now.

"The people of the Light," said the Elder, "toil so that we may live. It is not how I would have our world be." It nodded its great head, and Nyota understood that the fine crystalline structures of its mind would shatter, instantly, in the blue-white light of the sun. Down here in the dark, they were safe. "For their toil, we live."

"You remember," Nyota said. "You remember... everything."

"Almost." There was humour in its voice. "I remember everything that I am told, that I have been told, since I came to be."

"When was that?" she asked, reaching for her tricorder.

"When I was first here, we did not know what stars were." She suspected that if it could smile, it would. "We have learned a great deal since that time."

The tricorder bleeped and then chirruped in complaint; something about the density of the rock was preventing its signals from transmitting into orbit. Sighing to herself, she got a padd out of the pack and started to scribble.

Feeling rather than seeing the Elder's gaze on her, she said, "It's a piece of technology my people use, to record things."

"I have been told." A pause. "It is what you have, instead of us."

She smiled. "Something like that. Tell me, do you have a name?"

"I am the Elder. I had a name, once, in the Light. Do you have a name?"

For some reason the question was surprising. She looked up at it, properly. "My name is Nyota Uhura."

"I will remember you, Nyota Uhura."

 _When I am dust_ , she thought, later; and it made her shiver in the blue light of the world.

*

 _static_

The first language Nyota ever learned was Federation Standard, and the one after that was Vulcan.

She beamed down to the colony world on a quiet desert's evening – as an able-bodied Starfleet officer, capable of managing a little above Earth gravity, she was past time to do a stint in recovery work – and she gave them her name and they gave her work to do.

She planted seeds in long bays, amidst rows of workers; she archived ancient texts, scraps that remained of vast citadel libraries; she learned how to solder circuits together and how to prepare the ground for terraforming. She learned the feel of the soil, the different caresses of fertile earth and desert sand. She sent messages to Spock at the end of the long days, pictured them crossing the distances between stars, dropping out of subspace like notes onto his pillow.

The Vulcans fed her, housed her, were kind to her. She was shown to her room by Admiral T'Lara; Sarek paid her the solemn courtesies due a daughter of his house. But she grew used to the silence of the desert, the silence of nothing left to say. She was old enough, now, to understand the curious grammar of loss.

*

 _hello world_

Lieutenant Andrew Zhang had said, to no one in particular on the thirty-second straight day of their survey mission, "At least we're getting off this fucking rock in the morning", and then the ground had swallowed him up.

They made some progress in the days that followed. They found him eventually, bemused, remembering nothing, in a creek a mile downstream. Then they tapped on trees, they watched the rhythms of the waves lapping on the shore, and when the Enterprise arrived, the clouds formed whorls and flowers beneath its geostationary orbit and Nyota understood it in a single, dizzy rush.

"A language?" Spock murmured.

"An understanding," Nyota corrected, looking out at the bridge viewscreen.

After days and weeks of watching atmospheric patterns, chasing the tides and press-ganging dendrochronologists, they learned very little; Nyota beamed down to the planet and ran headlong across the cracked earth, shouting, "Hello! Hello, we can hear you! Hello!" until she sprawled down flat from exhaustion and thought about being an ant, crawling unnoticed across her own skin.

But it took time. One night, out of the tectonic movements beneath the earth: _I am_. The seismological rumbles passed through the rock, epicentre below the Enterprise. _I am here_.

It was only one verb, and the start of a lifetime's project for many Federation linguists – but afterwards, Nyota heard language in everything: songs in the batter of rain against glass, harsh rhythms in pounding surf, a queer and distant music in everything that grew, moved, and lived.


End file.
